How Georgia Became O'Keeffe (13 page)

I was fortunate to meet with one such Noted O'Keeffe Expert. I wrote a formal request for an interview and submitted it to her assistant, who said she would see if she could arrange an interview for me. The NOKE lives several time zones away from my home in Portland, but when I heard she would see me, I was overjoyed and immediately arranged a trip. I had so much to ask her. As I'm sure you've gathered, there are several different schools of thought on the nodal events of O'Keeffe's life. Take, for example, the Stieglitz photographic portrait. To what degree was Georgia a willing participant? Was she simply a woman in love, and therefore not in charge of all her faculties, or did she know exactly where the pictures would end up, and how they would propel her into the public eye?

The NOKE ushered me into her office and then sat crisply down at her desk and folded her hands. “What can I do for you?” Everything about her mien made me feel like the doomed movie heroine who is about to be turned down for the loan that would save the family farm.

“I'm writing a book called
How Georgia Became O'Keeffe
,” I said, sitting down in the chair in front of her desk. I opened my file folder and removed several pages of questions I'd wanted to ask.

She actually snorted. “Isn't everyone?”

“They are?” This was news to me. I felt myself blush. “A lot of people have books coming out on O'Keeffe?”

“Well, have you read my book?”

“Yes.” No. Published last century, her book was out of print. I'd purchased one of two used copies on offer at ­Amazon.com. It was $40.99, cost of shipping not included, and had shown up on my front porch the day before I'd left Portland. I'd just started reading it that morning, but I'm a slow reader and hadn't gotten very far.

“My thoughts are in there,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

We sat there.

“Um, I also wanted to hear your feelings on the real O'Keeffe. All the biographies have such different takes on her, and since you're an expert . . .” With each word that left my mouth I devolved: from the college student who studied the wrong chapter for the biology exam, back to the high school student who couldn't conjugate
mettre
, to the seventh grader who, pressed into reading a passage aloud in Social Studies, pronounced peninsula
penna-zula
, to the fifth grader who was, well, a fifth grader.

“Who do
you
think she was?” asked the NOKE.

“Well, a kind of a Midwestern person, a nice person from the Midwest,” I said. “Practical and direct and . . . Midwestern. In that way Midwesterners are.”

“If you read my book you'd know how I feel.”

I busied myself making a note to read her book, even though I was already reading her book.

“All of those biographers are friends of mine, and in one way or another, all of their books are flawed,” she said.

“I have a question about the sale of the Calla Lily pictures, people seem to be divided on—”

“My opinion is in . . .” She named the catalog of an exhibit.

“Okay,” I said. I was davening to such a degree that I was on the verge of banging my chin on her desk.

“Um, do you feel her most revolutionary work was also her best work, or—”

“I wrote about that in my essay in the catalog right behind you,” she said.

“Do you think she painted the flowers—”

“What bibliography are you using, anyway?” Her voice got higher and louder.

What bibliography was I using? Shit. All of them. None of them.

“I'm . . .” I started to say I was currently working from the bibliography at the back of Hunter Unpronounceable-Polish-Last-Name-Philp's book. I was in a full flop sweat. I was
half-Polish
—the pre–Ellis Island last name is Karbowski—and I couldn't even pronounce Hunter's last name.
§§§§§
“
Full Bloom
,” I said, remembering the title.

“Are you reading the letters? You have to read the letters. Sarah's book is coming out in June.”

“I have an advance reading copy,” I said.

“You must read all of the letters. There are 25,000, and you must go to the Beinecke and read them all. How did you get an advance copy?”

“My agent.”

“Who's your agent?”

“Inkwell Management.”

“What did you say the title of your book was?”

I told her.

The NOKE leaned back in her chair and looked at me, as if recalculating my worth.

“You must remember to say O'Keeffe was a staunch feminist. People never get that right about her.”

Georgia O'Keeffe was a staunch feminist.

8

DRIVE

Flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free

For those of us with parents who were children during the Great Depression, or those of us who paid attention during Modern U.S. History class, the year 1929
looms.
In October, the world would go to hell in a handbasket. By 1928, O'Keeffe was one of the most well-known artists in the country. Her yearly shows were well attended, her paintings purchased by dizzy heiresses and a growing number of serious collectors, including Duncan Phillips, one of the next generation of collectors of modern art, who founded The Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, D.C., the nation's first museum of modern art.

In
Exhibition of Paintings by Eleven Americans
, O'Keeffe's works
¶
hung beside those of Eugene Speicher. Yes,
that
Eugene Speicher—the same boy who was at the Art Students League with Georgia, and who had begged her to pose for him, telling her that she could easily afford the time since she was only going to become an art teacher anyway. When she found this out, did she do the 1920s version of the fist pump? Or maybe one of those dances football players do behind the goalposts after a touchdown?

It's possible she was consumed with her career, her painting, her suddenly bumpier-than-usual marriage. She'd had some health issues. She had other bigger and better fish to fry. Isn't that the way of it? Someone makes us feel like crap when we're already vulnerable and not making much progress in life. We vow that one day we'll make them pay!
call me nerd today, boss tomorrow
goes the popular T-shirt saying. The irony is that once you get there, once you're the boss, or shown in the same gallery as the self-important twit who'd written you off because you were a girl, you've moved on.

If you haven't moved on, you should have. Yes, I know. Revenge is a dish best served cold, but that only really holds true for people in countries where much of the day is spent dozing in the heat, brooding. Anyone with a to-do list simply can't be bothered . . . or she shouldn't be.

I went to a big Southern Californian suburban high school where I was the friend of the homecoming queen. I was the perennial sidekick, and friend to all the cute boys who had crushes on my friends. Even my mother wondered why, since I wasn't bad-looking, I never had any dates. Off I went to college, where I also had no dates. I vowed that one day I would come back and show them! Those girls would have boring husbands, colicky babies, and the ten pounds of post-pregnancy belly fat that went with them, and I would have—well, not that. Since I never had any dates, I would be unlikely to have a husband, even a boring one, and the resultant babies.

By the time my twenty-year high school reunion rolled around, I'd published two novels. I'd moved away from the Southern California suburb to Portland, Oregon, where I lived with (surprise!) my husband and little baby. Bruce Springsteen's “Glory Days” was playing, and I strode into that reunion in my purchased-just-for-the-occasion strappy bronze sandals, and I got myself a cocktail and lay in wait for the first person to ask me what I'd been up to. I'd left the husband and baby at home, even though some girls (losers!) brought theirs.

It happened in the ladies' room, which was packed with girls-now-women, peeing and primping. Someone asked what I was up to. This was it. Here was my moment to shine. I would make her feel the way Speicher must have felt upon learning that Georgia O'Keeffe had twice the career he could ever hope to have. But the moment the word
writer
left my lips, the girl who asked looked away and said, “Yeah, well I mean to read more, I really do. But I just don't. I have a library card, though.” This happened over and over again. No one wanted to hear about my books, except Mr. Pendell, the art teacher. Everyone else avoided the subject. I had gone from being the friend of the homecoming queen (who looked as beautiful and queenly as ever), to the person on the corner in front of your favorite Starbucks who works for a well-meaning underfunded grassroots organization that saves puppies from global warming, whose eyes you can't meet and who nevertheless makes you feel guilty as hell. You're probably ahead of me on this one, but the girls with the chubby husbands and boring babies loved them. They loved their lives.
*
They didn't envy my being a writer. Why would they?

It is unknown whether O'Keeffe ever attended a class reunion at the Art Students League, but if she did, I feel confident in saying that she never cornered Speicher and informed him that she was an artist, and not an art teacher, ha ha ha.

In any case, 1928 was a banner year for O'Keeffe, despite the fact that the art market wasn't as frisky as it had been several years earlier, perhaps a portent of the belt-tightening that was to come.
†

On April 16, 1928, a slightly disingenuous
New York Times
headline read
artist who paints for love gets $25,000 for 6 panels.
‡

Maybe one of the reasons “everyone” is writing a book about O'Keeffe, and people remain as interested in her life as they are in her work, is because certain key experiences remain tantalizingly open to interpretation. This is one of them. The sale was headline-worthy because it was the highest price ever paid for a work by a living American artist. Stieglitz had a dramatic story to go along with the high purchase price: The six panels had hung in a row at her 1928 show. A dashing, well-dressed stranger pulled Stieglitz aside and told him he wanted to buy the lot of them. Stieglitz was flabbergasted. His heart beat dangerously fast. He was extraordinarily picky about who could own an O'Keeffe, and he wasn't sure this flashy gent met his standards. He threw out a number: $25,000.
§
Without a moment's hesitation, the man agreed. Stieglitz made him promise to display them together, and never to sell them. The man agreed to this as well. The panels were whisked off to Paris, never to be seen again.

It's likely that Stieglitz made this up, to cover up the true, non-headline-worthy sale. It's one of the things he was best at, and for which, despite her many mixed feelings, O'Keeffe felt grateful: getting press. He knew that once a headline was run, the news was out. He was like those TV lawyers who throw out some damning statement that the judge then instructs the jury to pretend they've never heard. The paintings going to Paris is a nice embellishment, especially since for decades, the movement of masterpieces had been in the opposite direction, from Europe to America. Now there would be paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, American, hanging over a blue velvet
récamier
in some swanky flat in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

The Noted O'Keeffe Expert, whom I respect (even if she did make me feel like a brainless, red-poppy-poster-loving nincompoop), believes that the secret, anonymous buyer was Stieglitz wingman, Mitchell Kennerley, owner—until he went bankrupt—of the Anderson Galleries. Kennerley was British, but in every other way he was like someone out of
The Great Gatsby
, by which I mean a larger-than-life man-of-means. In addition to being an art auctioneer and gallery owner, Kennerley was also a publisher, famous at the time for having been sued by Harper & Brothers, the publishers of Mark Twain, for copyright infringement. Kennerley published
Jap Herron,
written by Twain from beyond the grave, and transmitted to Kennerley author Mrs. Emily Grant Hutchings by Ouija Board.

His literary exploits were dubious, but over the years he'd been a friend to Stieglitz. When Stieglitz moved into Elizabeth's tiny studio with O'Keeffe, Kennerley stored the rest of his stuff for him, and it was Kennerley's idea to mount a retrospective exhibit of Stieglitz's photographs, which included the famous forty-five pictures that launched Georgia's career.

Kennerley bought the Calla Lily pictures for $25,000, but Stieglitz agreed that he could pay in installments. Kennerley couldn't afford the pictures at the moment, but he was engaged to a wacky heiress,
¶¶
Margery Durant Campbell Daniel, the daughter of the one-time CEO of General Motors, and his plan was to woo her with a gift of them; after they were married he would use her money to pay the balance. While wacky Margery was in Reno getting her divorce, she kept two of the smaller Calla Lilies with her for company, but alas, once she returned she fell in love with someone else and returned the pictures to Kennerley, who stopped making his payments a short while later, and was forced to return them to Stieglitz.

By then, all the newspapers had picked up the story, and O'Keeffe was besieged by interviews. She sat for them reluctantly. For the length of her long life she agonized over her mixed feelings about publicity. She knew it was important, but she was so private. She was never able to successfully convince herself that it didn't matter, or become more open. Her reputation, carefully crafted by Stieglitz, as Pure, Feeling Woman-Child Ruled by Intuition, was no less manufactured than his photographs and her paintings. O'Keeffe was a pragmatic Midwesterner. Like everyone who does not suffer from a personality disorder, her heart could lead her astray when it came to love, but when it came to her work, she was practical and hardheaded. She knew that regardless of whether the headline about the sale of the pictures was true or not, it would be foolish not to leverage the attention.

Her celebrity was thus refreshed. Only this time, instead of being a newspaper personality known for her naked torso and love affair with a married older man, she became famous for her work, and the high prices it commanded. To further burnish her growing and glowing image as one of the best, most exciting living American artists, male or female, she traveled to Washington, D.C., at the behest of her old friend Anita Pollitzer, to address the National Woman's Party.

O'Keeffe really was a staunch feminist, as the NOKE insisted. I'm tucking this tidbit in here because I fear that if I lead off a chapter with it, or create a highlighted section within a chapter, calling it How to Be a Feminist, readers who love art, strong women, fascinating characters, life lessons, and cheeky modern narratives,
**
will run from this book the same way my dog does when she poops in the neighbor's yard.

When I was in college, and disco, not feminism, was king,
††
someone defined feminism for me as “believing the lives of women matter as much as the lives of men.” Can anyone argue with that? If what women are posting on Facebook these days is any indication,
‡‡
I think we can say that we now believe that pretty much everything that happens to us is at least as important as anything that happens in the lives of men. Like the word
gay,
which evolved from meaning “joyful” to “stupid or lame” in a few short decades, feminism has come to mean Humorless Female Who Will Never Wear Stylish Shoes and Has Issues with Waxing.

The concept must be rebranded. Might we call it something like
esprito
?
§§
From the French word
esprit
, which means “liveliness of mind and spirit.” The added “o” places the concept across the universe from an -ism (boring!) of any kind, instead evoking a party atmosphere, making
esprito
sound like something you might enjoy with salsa, after a shot of tequila. It could also be spelled phonetically,
espreeto.
This makes it sound like it could be related to a shopping spree, and less like a religion that involves animal sacrifice.

O'Keeffe's brand of
espreeto
emphasized self-reliance. She felt that women should earn their own living, but, more important, that they had a responsibility to their true selves to find out what they were good at, and to pursue it.

A Lesson on Envy

Right about now you would be forgiven for envying Georgia O'Keeffe. It's one thing to read about her struggles living at the far end of the world, and borrowing money to go to school, and then having to quit school because the money ran out, and sleeping in a series of dingy, rented rooms, and carrying on a long-distance relationship with a man belonging to the Stop It Some More School of Courtship and then, just when it looks like things are finally going her way, being embarrassed by naked pictures made public by yet another man. We could root for her then, and empathize.

By 1930 however, she was famous. Her yearly exhibits garnered plenty of notice, and her paintings sold. Increasingly, critics wrote about her work and not her gender; even the ones who thought she was overhyped and undertalented came at her for complicated issues related to her painterly technique, the quality of her brushstrokes, her choice of colors. She had realized her life's dream of earning a living by her art and was the first American woman painter to do so. To the world she appeared unflappable and weirdly elegant in her black vestments and flat shoes, her gleaming black hair always pulled straight off her face in a bun at the nape of her slender neck. Did I mention, she was also thin?

But all was not well. Indeed, everything else in her life pretty much sucked.

Her health had not been good. O'Keeffe could be as robust as a cowgirl, then would fall mysteriously ill from something undiagnosable that probably only affects geniuses. One time, she was felled by a smallpox vaccination. Shortly after being vaccinated her legs became swollen and Lee, Alfred's brother and the family physician, “cured” her by tightly binding them from thigh to ankle and ordering full bed rest. After
nine
weeks, she recovered (a cold pack and some aspirin would have solved the problem overnight). There was no middle ground, it seemed, no days when Georgia was feeling a little rough around the edges but soldiered on. She was either getting up before dawn to do her many-miled walk, planting a garden, writing eighty-seven letters, then dashing off a masterpiece, or flat on her back in bed for months at a time. Maybe echinacea and zinc really do ward off colds, like the hippies say.